Part 15

I wonder if sometimes, at that sunset hour when the lengthening shadows of the hills fall athwart the blossoming orchards, there do not wander through the Santa Clara those whom the eyes of mortals cannot see—Portola, swart of face under his steel cap, come back to feast his eyes once more, from the top of yonder hill, on that fertile valley which he was the first white man to see; Father Serra, mild-mannered and gentle-voiced, trudging the dusty highroad in his sandals and woollen robe, pausing to kneel in prayer as the bells boom out the Angelus from that mission which he founded; Captain Jedediah Smith, the first of the pathfinders, a strange and romantic figure in his garb of fringed buckskin, leaning on his long rifle as he looks down on the homesteads of the thousands who followed by the trail he blazed across the ranges; Stanford, who linked the oceans with twin lines of steel, pacing the campus of that great seat of learning which he conceived and built—guardian spirits, all, of that valley for which they did so much and which they loved so well.

VIII

THE MODERN ARGONAUTS

“For once you’ve panned the speckled sand and seen the bonny dust, Its peerless brightness blinds you like a spell; It’s little else you care about; you go because you must, And you feel that you could follow it to hell. You’d follow it in hunger, and you’d follow it in cold; You’d follow it in solitude and pain; And when you’re stiff and battened down let some one whisper ‘Gold,’ You’re lief to rise and follow it again.”

VIII

THE MODERN ARGONAUTS

I once knew an Englishman and his wife who were possessed with a mania for things Egyptian. Some people were unkind enough to say that they were “dotty” on the subject, but that was an exaggeration. They knew all there was to know about Egyptian customs from the days of Amenhotep to those of Abbas Hilmi; they had delved in the sand-smothered ruins across the river from Luxor; they could converse as fluently in the degraded patois of the native coffee-houses as in the classic Arabic spoken at the University of El Azhar. Their chief regret in life was that they had not been born Egyptians. Their names were—but never mind; it is enough to say that they had coronets on their visiting cards and owned more fertile acres in Devonshire than an absentee landlord has any right to possess. Whenever they came to Cairo, which they did regularly at the beginning of the cold weather, they could never be induced to take the comfortable motor-bus which the management of Shepheard’s Hotel thoughtfully provides for its guests—at ten piastres the trip. Instead, they would wire ahead to have a couple of camels meet them at the station, and, perched atop of these ungainly and uncomfortable beasts, would amble down the Sharia Kamel, which is the Fifth Avenue of Cairo, and dismount with great pomp and ceremony in front of their hotel to the delectation of the tourists assembled upon its terrace. I once asked them why they chose this outlandish mode of conveyance when there were a score or so of perfectly good taxicabs whose vociferously importunate drivers were only awaiting a signal to push down their little red flags and set their taximeters whirring.

“Well, it’s this way,” was the answer. “We’re jolly fond of everything Egyptian, y’ know. Sort of steeped ourselves, as you might say, in the country’s history and politics and customs and language and all that sort of thing. This city is so romantic and picturesque that a motor-car seems to be inappropriate and unfitting—like wearing a top hat in the country, y’ know. So we always have the camels meet us—yes. All bally nonsense, I suppose, but it sort of keeps us in the spirit of the place—makes us feel as though we were living in the good old days before the tourist Johnnies came and spoiled it all. Same idea that Vanderbilt has in driving his coach from London down to Brighton. You can make the trip by train in half the time and for half the money and much more comfortably, but you lose the spirit of the old coaching days—the atmosphere, as the painter fellows call it. Rum sort of an idea to use camels instead of taxis, perhaps, but we like it and that’s the chief thing after all, isn’t it? What?”

That was precisely the frame of mind which caused us to disregard the one hundred and twenty-five miles of oiled highway which reaches, like a strip of hotel linoleum, from San Francisco to the Californian capital, and load ourselves, together with our six-cylindered Pegasus, aboard the stern-wheel river boat which leaves the Pacific Street wharf for Sacramento at half past eight on every week-day morning. That section of our Mexico-to-Alaska journey which lay immediately before us, you must understand, led through a region which is indelibly associated with “the days of old, the days of gold, the days of ’Forty-Nine,” and to storm through it in a prosaic, panting motor-car seemed to us as incompatible with the spirit of romance which enshrouds it as it would to race through the canals of Venice in a gasoline launch. Feeling as we did about it, the consistent thing, I suppose, would have been to have hired a creaking prairie-schooner and plodded overland to the mines in true emigrant fashion, but as the few prairie-schooners still extant in California have fallen into the hands of the moving-picture concerns, who work them overtime, we compromised by journeying up to the gold country by river boat, just as the Argonauts who came round the Horn to San Francisco were wont to do.

Whoever was responsible for dubbing the Sacramento River trip “the Netherlands Route” could have had but a bowing acquaintance with Holland. I don’t like to shatter illusions, but, to be quite truthful, the banks of the Sacramento are as unlike the Low Countries as anything well could be. The only thing they have in common are the dikes or levees which border the streams and the truck-gardens which form a patchwork quilt of vegetation behind them. The Dutch waterways are, for the most part, small, insignificant affairs, third or fourth cousins to the Erie Canal, and so narrow that you can sling your hat across them. The Sacramento River, on the contrary, is a great maritime thoroughfare four hundred miles in length and navigable for three quarters of that distance, being fourth among the rivers of the United States in tonnage carried. From the deck of a Dutch canal-boat you cannot see a mountain, or anything which could be called a mountain by courtesy, with a telescope. Look in whichever direction you will from a Sacramento River boat and you cannot escape them. Even at night you can descry the great walls of the Coast and Sierra Nevada Ranges looming black against a purple-velvet sky. And the racing windmills with their weather-beaten sails—the most characteristic note in a Dutch landscape—are not there at all. It’s rather a pity, it seems to me, that Californians persist in this slap-dash custom of labelling the natural beauties for which their State is famous with European tags. Why, in the name of heaven, should that enchanted littoral which stretches from Coronado to Monterey be called “Our Italy”? Why should the seaward slopes of the Santa Ynez Range, at the back of Santa Barbara—a region which is Spanish in history, language, and tradition—be dubbed “the Riviera”? Why should Santa Barbara itself, for that matter, be called “the American Mentone”? Is there a single sound reason why the majestic grandeur of the Sierra Nevada should be cheapened by labelling it “the American Alps”? No, not one. And it seems to me, as a visitor, a travesty to nickname the Sacramento, a river as long and as commercially important as the Seine and draining the greatest agricultural valley in the world, “the Netherlands Route”—because, forsooth portions of its banks are protected against overflow by levees. Compare the wonders of California to those of Europe by all means, if you will, and nine times out of ten they will emerge victorious from the comparison; but for goodness’ sake don’t saddle them with names which in themselves imply secondariness.

The Sacramento is a river of romance. To those conversant with the stirring story of early California, its every bend and reach and landing-place recalls some episode of those mad days when the news that a man had discovered yellow gravel in a Sierran mill-race spread like a forest-fire across the land, and the needy, the desperate, and the adventurous came pouring into California by boat and wagon-train. About it still hover memories of the days when this river of dikes ran between high banks; when the great valley to which it gives its name was as unsettled and unknown as the basin of the Upper Congo; when Sacramento, then but a cluster of tents about a log stockade, was an outpost on the firing-line of civilisation. This winding stream was the last stage in the long journey of those gold hunters who came round the Horn in their stampede to the mines. The river voyage was one of dreams and doubts, of hopes and fears. At every landing where the steamer touched were heard reports of new bonanzas found in the Sierran gulches, of gold strikes on the river bars, of mountain brooks whose beds were aglitter with the precious ore. Returning down this same river, as time went on, were the booted, bearded, brown-faced men who were going home—ah, happy word!—after having “made their pile” and those others who had staked and lost their all.

The river trip of to-day gives graphic proof of the changes which threescore years have wrought; it shows that agriculture, not mining, is now the basis of the State’s prosperity, just as it must be the basis of every civilisation which is to endure. The interest commenced at the journey’s very start. Swinging out from the unending procession of ferries which form, as it were, a Brooklyn Bridge between Oakland and San Francisco, we churned our way under the cliffs of Alcatraz, the white-walled prison perched upon its summit looking for all the world like the sea-fowl for which this penal isle is named. Though Alcatraz may lack the legendary interest which attaches to the Château d’If, that rocky islet in the harbour of Marseilles where the Count of Monte Cristo was imprisoned, it is no less picturesque, particularly at sunset, when the expiring rays of the drowning sun, striking through the portals of the Golden Gate, transform it into a lump of rosy coral rising from a peacock sea. Off our port bow Tamalpais, a weary colossus wrapped in a cape of shaggy green, looked meditatively down upon the heedless city as, seated upon the hills, he laved his feet—the Marin and Tiburon Peninsulas—in the cooling waters of the bay. Keeping well to the eastern shore, where the lead shows seven fathoms clear, we skirted the city’s shipping front, where fishing-boats, their hulls painted the bright hues the Latins love, and some—the Greek-owned ones—with great goggle eyes at their bows (the better to detect the fish, of course), were slipping seaward like mallards on the wing. To starboard lay the shores of Contra Costa County (meaning, as you doubtless surmise, “the opposite coast”), the long brown fingers of its innumerable wharfs reaching out into the bay as though beckoning to the merchantmen to come alongside and take aboard the cargoes—oil, wine, lumber, grain, cheese, fruit—which had been produced in the chimneyed factories that fringe this coast or raised in the fertile valleys which form its hinterland. Crossing over to the port rail as our steamer poked its stubby nose into the narrow Straits of Carquinez, we could make out Mare Island Navy Yard with the fighting craft in their coats of elephant grey riding lazily at anchor in front of it, while against the hill slopes at the back snuggled the white houses of Vallejo, the former capital. Our first stop was at Benicia, on the right bank of the Carquinez Straits, which lie directly athwart the Overland Route to the East and are familiar to transcontinental travellers as the place where their entire train, from engine to observation-car, is loaded on a titanic ferry. This was the home of Heenan, the “Benicia Boy,” the blacksmith who fought his way upward to the heavyweight championship of the world, and the forge hammer he used is still proudly preserved here as a memento of the brawny youngster who linked the drowsy village with a certain brand of fame. Benicia succeeded Vallejo as the capital of California, and the old State House where the Argonaut lawmakers held their uproarious sessions still stands as a monument to the town’s one-time importance, which departed when its parvenu neighbour, Sacramento, offered the State a cool million in gold for the honour of being its capital.

Leaving sleepy Benicia, with its memories of prize-fighters and lawmakers, in our wake, we debouched quite suddenly into Suisun Bay (suggestive of Japan and the geisha girls, isn’t it?) with the Suisun marshes just beyond. You will have to journey north to Great Central Lake, in the heart of Vancouver Island, or south to Lake Chapala, in the Mexican State of Jalisco, to get wild-fowl shooting to equal that on these grey marshes, for here, in what Easterners call winter-time but which Californians designate duck time, or the season of the rains, come mallard, teal, sprig, and canvasback, plover, snipe, and brant, in flocks which literally darken the sky. In the waters hereabouts is centred the fishing industry of the Sacramento River, which has been monopolised by swarthy, red-sashed fellows who speak the patois of Sicily or Calabria or the Greek of the Ægean Isles. No wonder that these sons of the south look on California as a land of gold, for an industrious fisherman, who will attend to his nets and leave alone the brandy and red wine of which they are all so fond, can earn twenty-five dollars a week without any danger of contracting heart disease; his brother in Palermo or the Piræus would consider himself an Andrew Carnegie if his weekly earnings amounted to that many _lire_ or _drachmæ_. If one is in quest of colour and picturesqueness he can steep himself in them both by taking up his residence for a time among these fisherfolk of Suisun Bay, but if he does so he had better take the precaution of keeping a serviceable revolver in his coat pocket and leaving his address with the river police.

The delta formed by the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, which, after paying toll to the fruitful valleys through which they pass, clasp hands near Suisun Bay and wander together toward the sea, bears a striking resemblance to the maze of islands and lagoons and weed-grown waterways at the mouth of the Nile. Some of these low-lying islands are but camping grounds for migrating armies of wild fowl; on others, whose rich fields are guarded by high dikes such as you see along the Scheldt, are the truck-gardens, tended with the painstaking care that makes the Oriental so dangerous a competitor of the Caucasian. It is these river gardens which make it possible for the San Franciscan to have asparagus, peas, artichokes, alligator pears, and strawberries on his table from Christmas eve around to Christmas morning, and more cheaply than the New Yorker can get the same things in cans. Indeed, a quarter of the asparagus crop of the United States comes from these levee-shielded tule lands along the Sacramento. That, I suppose, is why it is so hard for an Eastern _bon vivant_ to impress a Californian. The New Yorker, thinking to give his San Franciscan friend a real treat, takes him to Sherry’s or the Plaza and, shutting his eyes to the prices on the menu, orders a meal in which such out-of-the-season delicacies as asparagus figure largely.

“Quite like home,” remarks the Californian carelessly. “My wife writes that she is getting asparagus from our own garden every day now and that strawberries are selling in the market for fifteen cents a box. Alligator-pear salad? Not any, thanks. The chef at the club insists on giving it to us about four times a week, so I’m rather tired of it. If it’s all the same to you I think I’d like some pumpkin pie and milk.”

Hanging over the rail, I took huge delight in watching the stream of traffic which turned the river into a maritime Broadway: stern-wheel passenger steamers, ploughing straight ahead, with never a glance to right or left, like a preoccupied business man going to his office; busy little launches, teuf-teuffing here and there as importantly as district messenger boys; panting freighters with strings of grain-laden barges in tow; ugly, ill-smelling tank-steamers carrying Mr. Rockefeller’s petroleum to far-off, outlandish ports; scow-schooners, full sisters of those broad-beamed, huge-sailed lumbering craft which bring the products of the Seine banks down to the Paris markets; big black dredgers, mud-stained and grimy, like the labourers they are, hard at work reinforcing the dikes against the winter floods; tide-working ferries, lazy, ingenious, resourceful craft which swing across the river, up-stream or down, making the current or the tide or both do their work for them.

After Isleton is passed the river settles down to an even width of sixscore yards, flowing contentedly between banks festooned with wild grape-vines and shaded by oaks and walnuts, sycamore and willows, between which we caught fleeting glimpses of prosperous homes whose splendid trees and ordered gardens reminded us of country places we knew along the Thames. This is the most beautiful part of the river by far. Every now and again we glimpsed the mouth of a leafy bayou which seemed to invite us to explore its alluring recesses in a canoe. A moment later a little bay would disclose a fine old house with stately white columns and a mansard roof—the result, most probably, of the owner’s success in the gold-fields sixty years ago. These homes along the Sacramento have none of the _nouveau riche_ magnificence of the mansions at Pasadena and Montecito, but they are for the most part dignified and characteristic of that formative and romantic period in which they were built. Clarksburg, one hundred and ten miles from San Francisco, is the last stop before Sacramento, ten miles farther on. Here the river banks become more busy. Steam, motor, and electric lines focalise upon the capital. We passed a colony of house-boats, not the floating mansions one sees at Henley, but simple, unpretentious craft which admirably answer their purpose of passing a summer holiday. Wharfs began to appear. A great black drawbridge, thrusting its unlovely length across the river, parted sullenly for us to pass. Above a cluster of palms and blossoming magnolias the dome of the capitol appeared, the last rays of the setting sun striking upon its gilded surface and turning it into a flaming orb. The air was heavy with the fragrance of camellias. A bell tinkled sharply in the engine room, the great stern wheel churned the water frantically for a moment and then stopped, the boat glided deftly alongside the wharf, the gang-plank rumbled out. “All ashore!” bawled some one. “All ashore! Sacramento!”

In the gold-rush days Sacramento was to the mining region what Johannesburg is to the Rand—a base of supplies, a place of amusement, where the miners were wont to come to squander their gold-dust over the polished bars of the saloons and dance halls or on the green tables of the gambling-houses. Those were the free-and-easy days when anything costing less than a dollar was priced in “bits,” a bit having no arbitrary value but being equivalent to the amount of gold-dust which could be held between the thumb and forefinger. In the days when placer mining was in its glory, debts were discharged in gold-dust instead of coin, and it often happened when a man was paying a small grocery bill, or more particularly when he was buying a drink, the bartender, instead of taking the trouble to weigh the dust, would insert his thumb and forefinger in the miner’s buckskin “poke” and lift a pinch of gold-dust. So it came to pass that when a man applied for a job as bartender his ability to fill the position would be tested by the proprietor asking, “How much can you raise at a pinch?” whence the familiar colloquialism of the present day. The more that he could raise, of course, the more valuable he would be as an employee, the chief requisite for a successful bartender being, therefore, that he should have splay fingers. In gold-rush times steamers ran daily from San Francisco to Sacramento, just as they do to-day, for the river provided the quickest and easiest means of reaching the mines from the coast, while six-horsed Concord coaches, the names of whose drivers were synonyms for reckless daring, tore along the roads to Marysville, Stockton, and Nevada City as fast as the horses could lay foot to ground.